London, ah London!! Today marks just over one week since being back in the United States, and all I can say is that I think about her (London) every single day.
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I was looking back at one of my first Substacks, published on September 9th, titled hi from london! from when I first moved abroad. It reads:
This is my first London dispatch, and writing this newsletter, it’s hard to believe that I’m physically here! Thousands of miles from the US. I counted and I’m coming up on my fifteenth day. For some context, I moved here to do my Masters in Art History, though my term starts September 18th. In the meantime, I’ve been simply existing and trying to navigate the transition with patience and grace, which in all honesty has been harder than I’ve expected.
And maybe this is intertextuality/navel-gazing, but with the smallest sense of audience, I guess I can do that here. This is what I wrote:
I know that things will get easier once my term starts, but with all my free time (now that I’ve settled in) my sense of aloneness feels magnified, though I know, intellectually, I’m not. I miss little things: being able to get larger portions of vegetables that aren’t prepackaged in plastic (usually), familiar acquaintances, texting (not sending a WhatsApp) to family and friends, biking at the lake, and knowing where to go to study.
There is far too much to condense and still countless moments of connection that I keep turning over in my mind, relishing their precious secrecy, but reading this, it’s shocking how much everything changed in one year. For instance, the things I listed (taking myself quite literally) ‘being able to get larger portions of vegetables that aren’t prepackaged in plastic (usually), familiar acquaintances, texting (not sending a WhatsApp) to family and friends, biking at the lake, and knowing where to go to study’ ended up being the very last things I thought about.
For one, I am now a WhatApp convert, and am disoriented by all the blue on iMessage. I had more than enough places to study at and graduated with a distinction. But more macrocosmically, I am still thinking about my last week in London. Where the time felt simultaneously stretched and short – knowing that by the end of it — the moment, the period, the pause would be gone. By the end of it, it was the people and the quality of life, in the tiniest things, that felt the most poignant.
The walk I took every morning through Kensington Gardens to reformer. The summer nights lounging around round pond. My tried and tested running route. The weather. M&S runs. The golden sky on my final night. Knowing which combination of staircases and escalators was fastest to the tube. My sweet landlady, without fail, ribbing me for wearing star-shaped pimple patches on my face. And my relationships with people, each one idiosyncratic and ticking with a nuanced rhythm.
What I have been turning over in my mind is the idea of growth, and of change, and of flux. Because I think there was something about London, maybe the newness of the environment, that made it easy to grow. To extend myself through travel, through togetherness, through conversations, through solitude in an unfamiliar (though cosmopolitan) environment, without perceived personal history or context.
I am thinking now too, sitting on an old deck chair on my porch, eating a spear of watermelon, trying to figure out when I should tutor my younger sister or unpack my bags, and about growing (or at least existing) in a ‘better’ or more poetic pattern at home. Or the idea of return to a place that feels familiar and sometimes oppressively all too predictable. How can I preserve the sense of boundlessness I felt in London this past year? That refreshed quality of attunement? Of attention?
I don’t know. But maybe trying to capture that feeling, to cultivate it is enough. And repeating a small truth until I’ve internalized it—the fact that I’ve changed since last being ‘here.’ And how it’s never only the space, it’s never only the place. It’s myself. And here too, it may be the people.
I’m trying to get back into things, so thank you (as always) for reading. You can say hi on Instagram.